At the beginning of the year we ran a survey on the State of Kotlin, asking developers for their thoughts, opinions, and experiences, about the language, its ecosystem and how they learnt it. We’ve had a phenomenal response from over 2.5K Kotliners from all over the world (super impressive, given our initial hopes were to get only 1,000 responses!).
But why did we do it?
Firstly, we love Kotlin at Pusher, where we provide realtime APIs for application developers wanting to build collaboration and communication features into their apps. All of our new Android SDKs since 2017 have been built in Kotlin.
We also know that Kotlin the language is universally loved among developers, and it makes most of them very happy. Lastly, we think surveys are both helfpul and fun, so we decided to create one for the Kotlin community. Something peeps can use to convince their friends and coworkers to jump into Kotlin and join the fun.
Some of the things we found out…
- Android is HUGE - about 80% of respondents said they are Android developers.
- Kotliners are a polyglot bunch, with respondents saying they use more than 30 other programming languages (although Java is huge)
- Speaking of Java, the interoperability between the two languages, and the tooling available to convert Java to Kotlin helped almost 97% of developers to migrate their code.
Read how successful they were in their migrations, and much more in the report.
All in all, Kotlin is going strong, and it seems that it will continue to grow, and so will its ecosystem.
We predict that over time, more and more of that growth will come from new developers for whom Kotlin will be their first foray into programming, and it just might happen that they will judge every other language against Kotlin. Its features and flexibility allow for great productivity and that could greatly influence the development of other programming languages as well.
If this sounds interesting to you, surf 🏄♀️ on to pusher.com/state-of-kotlin to check out the report, see some shiny graphs 📊, and be merry.
Top comments (3)
Having switched recently and migrated some spring boot code, I can confirm that this is both easy and worth the effort. I've been running hybrid java/kotlin for a few months now and basically at this point, any code I touch becomes kotlin. The migration is not fully automatic but close enough.
IMHO the release of spring boot 2.x was a big milestone for serverside.
Hi @zmarkan , thanks for sharing, really interesting. I have a question: do you already use or are exploring Kotlin server side at Pusher?
Hey, thanks a lot!
At the moment we aren't using or exploring Kotlin on the backend, just for our Android SDKd 😉